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* * *

Tom had just said, "Oh, I'm such an idiot," against the soft depths of Kyrie's tapestry-dyed hair, when the alarm sounded. For a moment, for just a moment, he thought it was ringing inside his head. Reminding him there was a reason he didn't usually allow himself to lose control, that he might at any moment lose control of himself and shift, which would work about as well in the van as it had in the bathroom.

He tried to tell the alarm to stuff it, but it continued to ring, quite oblivious to his opinions, and it dawned on Tom that it was the sound from the laptop at about the same time that Kyrie pulled away and said, "Damn, the laptop."

"Yeah," Tom said. "Yeah." It wasn't the most coherent response in the world, but it was the one he had, and he was going to stick to it.

Kyrie touched the button that made the screen saver stop scrolling by and brought the transmission from the camera to them in vivid, bold color. Tom remembered, irrelevantly, his father going on about how he'd picked that laptop because of the wonderful movie screen. All the same it took him a moment to figure out what he was looking at.

"Oh, good lord," Kyrie said. "Is he crazy or stupid?"

And then Tom realized he was looking at Rafiel and Lei Lani, without clothes, in what used to euphemistically be called a moment of passion. He jumped to the front seat and out. He had gone five steps before he realized that Kyrie hadn't been as fast. And it took him only two seconds to see a dire wolf round on him, from outside. It was growling in a low tone, and of course there were no words in its growl. But Tom would swear it was saying "Payback time, Dragon Boy."

 

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Framed